Summer Sons(77)

Phone on his chest and limbs splayed on the grass, Andrew observed the endless blue sky streaked with wisps of shredded clouds. The spread was so cavernously wide it compressed his lungs. The anger that had fueled him through the afternoon crackled, derailing his attempts to find his center and reorganize his thoughts. What could a person do out of desperation, driven to the brink out of fear for their career and their future—backed into a shitty corner by the whole system? He heard West’s voice: everything, nothing. Eddie had spent time alone with him. Eddie had bought him drinks and listened to him complain about their advisor, but his trust hadn’t run so far as to share the details of his work. Andrew rolled onto his side, scooping his bag strap over his shoulder as he stood.

In the garage, the Challenger welcomed him with the pungent, humid stink of leather and boy. He needed a change of clothes if he planned on crashing at Sam’s. That was as far as he let his skittish brain run before he pressed his thumb to the starter, waking its familiar purr. As he reached for the shifter, his hand passed into a patch of incongruous and impossible chill. He flinched out of it, startled. The same Misfits song that had been playing when he picked the car up from the impound lot burst from the speakers, crooning about skulls, and a casual stroke of fingernails scraped up his raised forearm before the spectral hand gripped his wrist. No time to escape, even less to scream, before the phantom settled on top of and through him, mimicking the posture of his slouch, bony knees spread on either side of the wheel in a mismatched fit—him inside the revenant inside him in terrible recursion. The garage wall pulsed and swam as his vision fogged; he arched forward to separate his chest from the ghost’s. His heart restarted as he escaped its rib cage, pounded hot and struggling and alive.

As he heaved a painful breath the specter disappeared, gone the instant it arrived, knocking him off his momentarily complacent pedestal. Based on the pattern of prior grim engagements, he’d drawn its attention somehow—but what had he done this time to tempt its casual and pervasive torment? The meeting with West, maybe, but what about it? He wiped his leaking nose with his forearm, panting through his mouth, then swallowed the fresh blood oozing down his throat from his sinuses in response to the traumatic visitation.

The campus garage in broad afternoon light didn’t seem like much of a locus point for the revenant’s manifestation. But—if he ignored the bedroom visitations, most of the haunt’s worst interference had occurred inside the Challenger. Someone had left it at the trailhead while dumping Eddie’s corpse—and he hadn’t put much thought into the logistical implications of that, of the car being found with the body, of the revenant’s attachment to the car being more than just a lingering affectation from life. Once his nose stopped bleeding onto his wadded shirt collar he shifted into gear, tires chirping as he passed the red light at the garage exit with unnecessary force. No one parked in the gravel alley behind Capitol except for him and Riley, and Riley wasn’t home when he arrived. Andrew set the brake, steeled himself for the possibilities, and pushed the button to pop the trunk. Why hadn’t he thought of that before, when searching for the phone the first time?

For an extended moment he loitered at the open driver’s door with an arm braced on the roof, convincing himself that he needed to push through his fear and look, one way or another. Breeze nipped around his ankles, scattering dried grass clippings from the yard. The abandoned alley held an eerie solitude. His haunting’s abrupt reminder that he had a constant shade dogging his heels left him on edge, but the sun drifting toward the horizon marked a time limit he wasn’t keen to test.

Gravel crunched as he rounded the tail end of the car. The trunk hung an inch open. He almost expected, when he slipped his fingers under the rim and lifted it, to find some gaping maw. Instead, the trunk contained a spare tire and a discarded spray bottle of Armor All with a greasy rag tied around it. Same as at the oak tree, Andrew wished he had a better option to get his answers, but—

Equally eager as it had been the first and last time he let it loose on purpose, the knotted spool of potential that pulsed in his veins responded with a vital, ugly spark the moment he nudged at it. He resisted the urge to push it back down as it unfurled beneath his bones. It was a leeching, corpse-cold thing; he wasn’t going to think of it as a real part of himself. It spread from its home in his belly through his veins, his teeth, his fingernails. The corpse of the neighbor’s house cat, buried three feet behind him in the yard under fresh-turned dirt, gave a homing pulse. Andrew jerked his attention from the welcoming rot and instead planted his hands against the trunk’s rough upholstery.

Barbs hooked through his palms on contact, echo calling to echo, blood answering blood. Slippery gore welled from the carpet as he crumpled over the trunk rim, sliding in the mess and struck stupid with borrowed agonies. His mouth filled with a taste that crossed old meat with the sick-sweet ooze of a cold sore. He gagged. If the vision at the tree had been hallucinatory, the trunk had no time for illusions. Images smashed through him, reeling like film stock and pulling like muscle memory.

A tarp filled the trunk and the slack, sluggishly bleeding body toppled into its plastic embrace. The remnant that had once been Eddie clung to its recent flesh, claws sunk into the inert matter of the corpse, unwilling to separate. One hand flopped loose over the rim of the trunk, the wound below gaping raw and wet; the ravaging memories of pain lanced through the remnant and the vision and Andrew. The dead hand was lifted and dropped on the corpse’s chest with distaste, like a marionette gone limp.